Istwa Nou

The site at Banwari Trace in Trinidad holds one of the earliest human occupations known anywhere in the Caribbean, dating to around 5000 BCE. Archaeologists label the period the Lithic or early Archaic Age, and it marks the point at which mainland populations began moving out into the island chain. What survives is mostly stone tools and refuse, the residue of people who hunted and gathered. That is thin material, and it still answers real questions: how the first islanders handled environments none of their ancestors had seen, and how they adjusted as sea levels kept changing under them. Everything that follows in the region, thousands of years of indigenous settlement, agriculture and exchange across the whole archipelago, begins from these deposits. Banwari Trace is where the human record of the Caribbean starts, and it sits about six and a half thousand years before the arrival that most chronologies treat as the beginning.

Barrera-Mordan, in the Dominican Republic, is one of the sites that forced archaeologists to move the date of human arrival in the northern Caribbean. The material there is a stone-working complex built on flaked tools struck from cores, and it dates to around 4000 BCE. The people who made it belong to what is labelled the Lithic age. They had no pottery, and they should not be confused with the ceramic-producing groups who reached the islands thousands of years afterwards and are far better known. What the assemblage records is a specialised adaptation, worked out for a set of islands with particular stone, particular coastlines and particular food. Sites like this are how the initial migration routes from the surrounding mainland get mapped, because the tool types are the trail. Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares, was inhabited about six thousand years ago by people who knew exactly what they were doing with rock.

Between roughly 400 BCE and 500 CE the islands fill with pottery and with settlements meant to last. The type sites are Trants on Montserrat and Hacienda Grande in Puerto Rico, both of which produced ceramics of a finish and complexity that archaeologists still use to define the period. The pottery matters for what it implies about everything else. Fired vessels are heavy, breakable and worth making only for people who intend to stay where they are, cook stored food and hold a surplus. The communities involved are usually associated with the Saladoid culture, and they ran maritime exchange over long distances between islands. Their surviving objects carry the symbolic work too, the designs and figures through which these societies said what they believed and who they were. Keegan and Hofman read the period as a shift in social organisation. A thousand years of Caribbean village life sits here, all of it before any European saw the region.